Welcome to a Crawford’s Mysteries and More! Book Club Book Review. Novels read in book club will fall into the following categories: Detective (crime is solved by a detective/police officer), Cozy (no violence), Caper (told from the criminal’s POV), and More (not strictly a mystery)! Todays’ pick is More!
If you just read the dust jacket of The Henna Artist by Alka Joshi as I did, then you’ll almost put the book down. It will sound like every other best selling book you’ve already read. Dust jackets try to provide you with the rush of exhilaration from riding a rollercoaster, while you’re still standing in line. They think they can provide you the enjoyment of eating that last bit of ice cream cone where all the ice cream has pooled to the tip, before you’ve ordered it at the counter. It sounds great, but leaves you feeling empty. Don’t make that mistake. This is a story you won’t want to miss and will become one of your perennial reads.
Lakshmi is a henna artist by trade, weaving her way into high society as she weaves promises of the future in her henna. Her clients adore her and are astounded by her art. They say she has the gift of prophecy. But even she couldn’t see what would happen when the teenage sister she never knew arrives on her doorstep. The life she worked so hard to rebuild starts to unravel as the intricacy of a child’s naivete clashes with the supposed order of the high class. While I tend to avoid books that contain domestic violence, I appreciated that Joshi gave us the background without the overwhelm. In this case, the domestic violence is the catalyst for the protagonist’s agency to build her own life by her own rules, but there are no heavy descriptions of the life she led prior to her becoming The Henna Artist of Jaipur.
This isn’t a mystery, and yet you are intrigued to learn what will happen next. This isn’t a thriller, and yet you don’t feel safe in your presumption that everything will turn out okay in the end. The drama lies in the relationship between Lakshmi and her younger sister, Radha; two generations of women raised in trauma whose lives intersect in heartbreaking ways.
Once you finish, make sure to check out her sequel, The Secret Keeper of Jaipur, just in time for the third installment to come out in 2022!
Learn more about Crawford’s Books here!
Elegance Press 